It is no secret that building a digital PR strategy that works is hard.
It is difficult to get those top placements in a changing media landscape with a lot of media targets and a lot of other brands and agencies competing for attention.
Although it is difficult to predict the future, any investment in digital public relations should yield results. This is how to build your digital PR strategies, and what KPIs you should set to get the best out of them.
What is “good”?
A successful digital PR strategy starts with defining success.
What does it mean to be good? What would you need for your client to say “Yes, this is great”? What are your KPIs, to give it proper business jargon?
Links are the most important performance indicator for any digital PR investment. This is true for most brands. Is your strategy able to help the website earn links that will increase its chances of ranking in search results? Digital PR is, in the vast majority of cases – and what distinguishes it from traditional PR techniques – what’s all about.
Sometimes, the larger goal of ranking can drive the decision to invest in digital PR. We know that link acquisition can have an impact on this, but it is not the only factor. Increasing your search rankings requires both off-page promotion as well as on-site optimization.
Sometimes, digital PR is requested from a larger picture.
Links and rankings are important. However, digital PR is a non-site environment that can help businesses reach their goals in terms of audience expansion and brand recognition. These metrics are harder to measure than others, but audience expansion and brand recognition are valid goals that can be used to help shape digital PR strategies.
No matter what your goal may be, a solid digital strategy for PR should start with defining the goals and measuring them.
It is important to invest enough in big ideas
You must be prepared to invest large amounts of money to win big. While caution will help you get the job done, if you are looking to make big changes for your client/brand, it is worth considering how you can expand your ideas and then go after them!
What does this all mean? This doesn’t necessarily mean that you should abandon caution and produce big-budget campaigns now and again. However, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t spend your time on a well-thought-out campaign that will take up a good chunk of your retainer or project budget.
If you have done your research on your client and your brand, you will be in a strong position for allocating a portion of your budget to a campaign that, if successful, will bring you the relevant volume of links. It is too easy to spread your money across too many campaigns. If you want to win big in this game, then be willing to put in the time.
This means that you give your campaigns the time they require to succeed. Spend time on ideation, and research, and let your ideas grow.
Once you have the idea, take the time to prepare your campaign and make sure you tell your story most effectively. When your campaign is complete, you should be ready to reach out to people to get the attention of the media.
These larger campaigns can have additional benefits that are worth it even if they don’t land the links you hope and expect. You can make assets that can be optimized for search to help you earn more traffic. Cookies can also track visitors and create new audiences to market to.
To maintain link velocity, layer in smaller campaigns
Although investing in larger campaigns may reap benefits, it is important to recognize that these bigger campaigns can consume your time before you reach outreach and link acquisition.
Link velocity has been a term that has fallen out of favor over the years. It doesn’t matter what your opinion is, Google and users will prefer a backlink portfolio that is constantly growing. This shows that the brand is worth talking about.
You should think about ways to earn links during those “trough” periods when big campaigns aren’t being launched.
You might decide to spend a smaller amount of your budget and time on a faster campaign that doesn’t require as much planning or preparation.
There are also ways to create links without using digital PR. Although digital PR is an effective tool for link acquisition, it has been around for only 5 years. Don’t forget the old link-building techniques that were used by SEOs. Citations, broken links, resource-based link building, and partnerships all play an important part in building links that add value to you/your client.
How to structure a digital PR strategy that works
You can create a natural backlink profile by layering different strategies. This will also help to mitigate risk.
Planning must be flexible. As we saw with COVID-19, the media landscape changes all the time. Something can happen that completely obliterates the planned activity.
A good PR will have a plan that maps out the strategies and granularity required for a business to succeed. So your strategy can improve, you must launch, review, and then learn every step.
